Epa Quotes

I think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok. ~ Rand Paul

Remember that sign they hung up in an EPA office during the Reagan administration, "No good deed goes unpunished"? Under George Bush, no good science goes unpunished. ~ David Helvarg

A strong argument can be made that Democrats are actually the greater evil, not the lesser one. Black Agenda Report (which provides "news, information and analysis from the black left") uses the phrase "the more effective evil" to describe Barack Obama. While their analysis has focused on non-environmental issues, it holds true for Obama's environmental record as well. Obama appears to be much more effective at advancing anti-environmental policies and programs than Republicans would be. One of the main reasons for this is Demophilia. If Mitt Romney had expanded offshore and onshore oil drilling, promoted nuclear power and fracking, attacked EPA rules, and pushed through trade agreements written by private corporations there would have been huge protests. Yet Obama does all these things with impunity while environmental organizations barely object. Demophilia enables the Democratic Party to get away with it, virtually unchallenged. Regardless ~ Carol Dansereau

I will use my position as chairman emeritus on the Energy and Commerce Committee to try to bring some common sense to EPA regulations. ~ Joe Barton

We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient. ~ Jill Stein

Christine Todd Whitman had to resign as the head of the EPA. You know, when the governor of New Jersey decides the environment is hopeless, you gotta really think that one through. ~ Greg Giraldo

We need responsible regulations, not regulations that have gone wild. For example, the EPA has a rule that is going to be implemented Jan. 1, 2012, where they're going to begin to regulate dust. That's right, dust. It's called PM 2.5. That is focusing on the wrong thing. ~ Herman Cain

With a century and change between the 1880 convention and now, I'll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another about most issues could summon forth such stark animosity. Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, our hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among our fellows with compassion and respect. As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they'll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA. ~ Sarah Vowell

By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites. ~ Sandra Steingraber

The EPA, the Gestapo of government, pure and simply has been one of the major claw-hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents. ~ Tom DeLay

The EPA is now the Employment Prevention Agency. ~ Bob McDonnell

Chemical manufacturers are responsible for reporting any potential problems they discover about these products. This makes Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chemical risk management dependent on information volunteered by industry, and industry has little incentive to look for damning problems or to disclose all it knows. ~ Nena Baker

Congressman Upton insisted that he hadn't changed his position on environmental issues. But Jeremy Symons, then a senior vice president of the nonpartisan National Wildlife Federation, said that the transformation was "like night and day." He continued, "In the past the committee majority viewed the Clean Air Act as an effective way to protect the public. Now the committee treats the Clean Air Act and the EPA as if they are the enemy. Voters didn't ask for this pro-polluter agenda, but the Koch brothers spent their money well and their presence can be felt." At ~ Jane Mayer

had a visit from the EPA the day before Collins announced he was taking over. They wanted to inspect the farm for some wetland to see if there were any endangered animals that needed protecting. I told them we had nothing but dry land, but they threatened to return with a fly over. Haven't heard a thing since. ~ Cliff Ball

Door's not locked," Zerbrowski said. "You're a cop. How can you leave your car unlocked?" I opened the door and stopped. The passenger seat and floorboard were full. McDonald's take-out sacks and newspapers filled the seat and flowed onto the floorboards. A piece of petrified pizza and a herd of pop cans filled the rest of the floorboard. "Jesus, Zerbrowski, does the EPA know you're driving a toxic waste dump through populated areas?" "See why I leave it unlocked. Who would steal it?" He knelt in the seat and began shoveling armfuls of garbage into the backseat. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

EPA gets to set a standard for new. For the existing, EPA sets guidelines for what we think is appropriate, but then states develop plans that work for them, taking into consideration their specific energy mix. ~ Gina McCarthy

The existence of the EPA regulation will require large carbon polluters to look at their hole cards, and some of them have decided that they much prefer legislation. ~ Al Gore

Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution - water pollution and other types of pollution - from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly. ~ Charles Duhigg

Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

Back when the EPA proposed phasing out ozone-depleting CFCs, the chemical industry howled that refrigerators would fail in America's supermarkets, hospitals and schools. ~ Frances Beinecke

I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

Here is another example that demonstrates the tightly linked interests that both cause and treat cancer. In 1978, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the largest companies in the world, specializing in agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, developed the cancer drug tamoxifen. In 1985, along with the American Cancer Society, ICI founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month with the aim of promoting mammography as the most effective tool against breast cancer. In 1990 Imperial Chemical Industries was accused of dumping DDT and PCBs, known carcinogens, into the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors. Zeneca, producer of tamoxifen, demerged from ICI in 1993, and later merged with Astra AB in 1999 to form AstraZeneca. Astra AB had developed the herbicide acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a probable carcinogen. In 1997 Zeneca purchased Salick Health Care, a chain of for-profit outpatient cancer clinics. Subsequently AstraZeneca launched a major publicity campaign encouraging women to assess their risk factors for breast cancer, downplaying the dangers of tamoxifen in order to create a market for its prophylactic, or chemopreventative, use and, more recently, for the breast cancer drug Arimidex (anastrozole), approved in 2002 and used as an alternative to tamoxifen (Arimidex went off patent in 2010). ~ S. Lochlann Jain

Today's political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun, in the name of the IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the DEA, the EPA, or a multitude of other ABCs of government authority. ~ Mark Skousen

The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word "epa" like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had ofen heard Sinhalese policeman and the army lob at civilians. Epa! when they didn't want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna. Epa! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya. Epa! Don't! The girl's voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi. ~ Rohini Mohan

Cuts in carbon emissions would mean significantly higher electricity prices. We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama's EPA. ~ Fred Upton

Before Alar, there was EDB, a potent human carcinogen allowed in the grain supply and other food for more than a decade after it was known to be dangerous. There was heptachlor, linked to leukemia, and aldicarb, which poisoned thousands of California watermelons, yet is still allowed in potatoes and bananas at levels exposing up to 80,000 children a day to what EPA itself says are unacceptable high risks. Trust the government? Why should we? ~ Al Meyerhoff

Are you afraid that you're hurting your national auto industry? - Environmental protection isn't a burden. It's innovation. Protecting a backward industry is no way to promote innovation. The government's role is to set standards and then ensure fair competition in the market. You win the market through fair competition. ~ Chai Jing

Let's shut down the EPA. The state knows best how to protect resources. ~ Joni Ernst

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The FDA and the EPA are supposed to be protecting us, not the people who make the poison. ~ Kenneth Eade

And I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be renamed the 'job-killing organization of America.' ~ Michele Bachmann

If the EPA continues unabated, jobs will be shipped to China and India as energy costs skyrocket. Most of the media attention has focused on the EPA's efforts to regulate climate-change emissions, but that is just the beginning. ~ Fred Upton

I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. ~ Harry Shearer

The fact is there are a lot of things happening at the federal level that are absolutely beyond the jurisdiction of the Constitution. This is power that should be shifted back to the states, whether it's the EPA - there is no role at the federal level for the Department of Education. ~ Mike Huckabee

EPA has a long history of relying on science that was not created by the agency itself. This often means that the science is not available to the public and, therefore, cannot be reproduced and verified. ~ John Barrasso

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective. ~ Barry Commoner

How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this? It's mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off. ~ Joe Bastardi

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. ~ Michael Crichton

Local and state governments have outrun the federal government. The EPA has served notice that it will enact a rule requiring CO2 reductions by major emitters in the absence of major legislation. But it's a blunt instrument that is a little more difficult to use than a legislative remedy. ~ Al Gore

I think you know how it works, Senator. The big chemical companies fill the coffers of one of your colleagues who is a lawmaker from an agricultural state such as, well, let's take Iowa, for example, and the lawmaker recommends the president to install industry executives in high positions, such as the head of the FDA or the EPA, and, this way, the industry can approve its own products without safety testing. ~ Kenneth Eade

Critics play a dangerous game when they denounce the science and law EPA has used to defend clean air for more than 40 years. The American people know better. ~ Gina McCarthy